The next time you hear a company say, "We take your privacy very seriously," try to stifle that guffaw that wants to escape from your belly. I know it will be hard, because between Facebook's prying and Google's spying, it doesn't seem like any large organization gives a damn about your personal privacy.

This week brings us several examples of corporations treating their customers' personal information like confetti at a ticker tape parade.

These stolen passwords had at least two things in common: They were protected using an MD5 hash, but not very well (obviously). In all of these cases, the sites failed to "salt" the hash by tossing random characters into the mix, making the encryption much more susceptible to a brute-force attack. In brute-force attacks, code crackers throw random password phrases at each hash until a match is found. So far, more than half of the LinkedIn hashes have been unhashed. Nice.

What's at stake here? Just your professional reputation and your love life (not to mention your secret fondness for the Bay City Rollers). No big deal, right?

The most straightforward solution is to change your password for these sites. But be careful how you go about it. Almost immediately after news of the hack went public, phisher spammers started taking advantage of the LinkedIn breach by sending out fake emails urging people to reset their passwords, then redirecting them to scam websites where their new passwords would be captured and used to steal their identities.

The other big takeaway: If you used the same password on LinkedIn or eHarmony as you did on other sites, you have to change those too, because they are probably in the hackers' hands as well. Sorry, Charlie.